My musings about human behavior and how we can design the world around us to better accommodate real human needs.

Friday, May 30, 2014

This week in EID – Episode 6

This week really spanned a wide variety of topics.I was going to say that it spans a wide
variety of interesting topics, but I suppose that is up to you to decide.

Monday:

Monday looked at one of my favorite topics, so I
hope you found this post interesting. Affective
cognition is the term for what I consider a counterintuitive but critical
aspect of the way we (humans) think.It
seems to us most of the time that we are using either logic OR emotion. But we
(in cognitive neuroscience) have learned that to the two areas of the brain are
so inextricably wired together that every decision we make is actually made up
of both processes – working together or at odds.This post looks at a particular application
of this idea – having a system monitor the user’s emotional state to customize the
way it works accordingly.The trick is
knowing what “accordingly” means.

Tuesday:

It is not often that I get to talk about mating rituals in a
human factors post.That alone made it a
fun one. But when it also gives us some good insights on improving safety, that
is an added bonus.

Wednesday:

This post has already received some input (thanks
Jaime!).It is a design for a calendar
widget that I am conflicted about.There
are some interesting ideas encapsulated there, but I am not sure the implementation
works.I am really interested in what
others think.

Thursday:

This post covers another of my favorite topics, in this case priming.This post focuses on the mental models we get
about products and brands. But priming happens all the time in just about
everything we do.A totally unrelated
thought can prime the next one if they are contiguous. I just read a great
summary of several studies on this, which I will be posting about next week.